Quotes About Progress

It is therefore incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.

in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

The form of government which prevails," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.

Progress in America does not usually begin at the top and among the few, but from the bottom and among the many. It comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful.

And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country's finest hours lay ahead.

His impulse," Winston Churchill had written of FDR in the mid-1930s, "is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land.

And so while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

America must move forward. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation's bloodstream.

get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights

Lincoln offered a case study in the leadership of hope and progress; Andrew Johnson's is an unhappier story of willfulness and single-minded service to a favored constituency—in this case, to white Southerners.

No country has yet reached the absolute in protecting human rights. In all countries, certainly including our own, there is much to be accomplished.

system, which opens the way for all." Too often, people view their own opportunity as dependent on domination over others, which helps explain why such people see the expansion of opportunity for all as a loss of opportunity for themselves. In such moments the forces of reaction thrive.

Surely, in the light of history," Mrs. Roosevelt remarked, "it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.

in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.

Writing in 1903, the scholar, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and, while Du Bois was surely right, it is correct, too, to say that color in some ways remains the problem of American history as a whole.

history is a living thing that never dies.

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good...compromise is the oxygen of democracy.

Yet for all that the United States has accomplished—and we have been a country that people take pains to come to, not to leave—we remain an imperfect union.

points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." We try; we fail; but we must try again, and again, and again, for only in trial is progress possible.

the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.

passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.

the problem with Google is that it is forever evolving – adjusting its algorithm in ways it keeps secret.

Fading photographs on the corridor walls from the 1960s and 1970s showed children strapped to frightening-looking machines, wires dangling from their heads. They smiled at the camera in uncomprehending excitement as if they were at the beach.